Thứ Ba, 10 tháng 1, 2012

Kixeye calls Kabam a copycat; Kabam says, 'Am not!'

Alright, so it's more serious than that, but we just can't help but envision these debates happening in schoolyards rather than public forums. Gamasutra reports that Kixeye has publicly accused Kingdoms of Camelot creator Kabam of copying the hit Kixeye game Backyard Monsters in creating EdgeWorld, Kabam's brand new Facebook strategy game. Of course, Kabam firmly denies the allegations.

"There is no question that the engineers of EdgeWorld had Backyard Monsters open in one window while they coded the copy in another," Kixeye CEO Will Harbin said in a statement. "It's not detrimental to Kixeye in the short term, but this kind of practice is bad for all of us in the gaming industry - it will eventually sour users and it certainly does the opposite of proving that Facebook can be a legitimate gaming platform."

Whoa, those are some pretty harsh--and specific--claims. Kixeye went even further, according to Gamasutra, to compare Kabam's hit Kingdoms of Camelot with fantasy strategy game Evony as evidence that Kabam "is wasting talent and resources on cloning games that already exist."

Kabam CEO Kevin Chou said in response that Edgeworld, which hovers at about 200 thousand monthly players since its launch, draws inspiration from "movies, pop culture, science fiction, literature, history and, most importantly, from our players." That's in addition to borrowing ideas and techniques from its previous four games. (In other words, "Am not!")

Keep in mind that these sort of exchanges aren't uncommon to Facebook games. In fact, Zynga--which has a lawsuit on its plate from SocialApps over allegedly misused source code from its game myFarm that led to FarmVille's inception--knows the feeling very well. We've contacted both developers for comment.